Sarah Angliss
Read
about Sarah's sound piece for the show:
She goes back under water
Download
Sarah's soundpiece (mp3)
She goes back under water
'
New
work for Infrasonic:
She Goes Back Underwater (2003)
My first instinct when writing for Soundless Music was to create something haunting. I recorded an ancient English Song, the Wife of Usher's Well, and mixed it with a recording of my neice, Flora. A few weeks earlier, I'd felt compelled to record Flora's voice when she started to tell me, in vivid detail, how she'd thought she'd seen a mermaid.
Usher's Well is a song I've known since childhood. It's a very dark song, concerning a mother who is visited by her dead children on the feast of Martinmas. This song has always captivated me - partly because I'm unsure if the visitation is real or imagined. I thought this had interesting resonances with Flora's account of a mermaid - another convincing apparation.
Flora told me her story in an undertone, as though she was imparting a secret. Under compression to bring out her breaths and so on, her voice had an unsettling edge, especially when she said her apparation 'goes back under water when mummy comes near the window - or anyone else'.
I'm glad I went through the process of setting Usher's Well although I wasn't entirely happy with the result. Verbal clues hammered home its emotional content, rather than letting the music take the lead. Some time later, I decided to abandon it in favour of a more suitable follow up. This is the piece you can hear on this site.
I processed Flora's voice using Praat, a speech analysis program introduced to me by psychologist Dr Chris Darwin (University of Sussex). Praat can be used to extract ‘formats’, characteristic tones in the voice, and use them to modulate other sounds. Praat is a research tool but as soon as I heard it, I knew I wanted to use it in a musical context. I hope the end result has an arresting, voice-like quality but doesn’t contain too many intelligible utterances that labour the theme of the piece.
On a practical level, the piece also has long sections of heavy bass. These enable us to mask any infrasound if we opt to use it in the piece.